Doctor's Orders
by elphabathedelirious32
Summary: Clarice sustains an injury and receives a visitor who is absolutely determined to ensure her recovery, no matter what the American Medical Association may say about his credentials. Set between 'Silence' and 'Hannibal.' Now complete.
1. Infection

**A/N: A little something I cooked up (leave my puns alone!) when I (much less dramatically) injured my own ankle. I did however find out that I am "sensitive" to vancomycin, that IV Benadryl hurts really bad, and that hospitals and IVs really, really suck. **

**Disclaimer: Decidedly not owned by me. **

Clarice was up again, against medical advice. She was supposed to leave her stupid, fucked-up ankle elevated, but had trouble keeping still; she kept making excuses to get up, trips for unnecessary food and books.

It was an idiotic injury; she'd gotten the back of her ankle slashed mildly in a fight with a suspect and had, of course, not even bothered bandaging it, and then two days later had woken up unable to walk, it was so swollen with infection. Painkillers got her to work, where she was ordered immediately by Crawford to get her ass to the ER. So Clarice got antibiotics and bed rest orders and was, to say the least, displeased.

So she had curled up on her couch to watch television and hurl curses at _Law & Order: SVU_ and its hack FBI psychiatrist, read a book on serial killers (and laugh a little nervously at assertions in a certain chapter she knew to be untrue), and drink "that damn fool fancy coffee you're so fond of," generously, if disparagingly, provided by Ardelia. But Clarice was getting restless, and was glad to have yet another excuse to get up when her doorbell rang.

She opened the door with foolish eagerness, not looking through the window first.

"Tsk, tsk, tsk, Clarice," said the man at the door. "You didn't have to get up."

Her response was automatic: "Well, I don't know what _you _do when people ring _your _doorbell, Dr. Lecter, but out here the customary thing is to _answer _it."

_And now you're engaging in witty banter with a serial killer_, she thought as the words left her mouth. _Great way to keep your heart rate down, Starling_.

"Aren't you going to invite me in?" asked Dr. Lecter.

"Why, will you kill me for my rudeness if I don't? Or are you a vampire now?"

"Such fire, Clarice," Hannibal chuckled. "Not at all, although I have been called a vampire once or twice. No, I am merely concerned about the effect on your ankle should you continue standing like that."

"How did-" Clarice started, but hit a memory and paused. _'The bleeding's stopped.' _ "Of course."

"If you're curious," he said, "I'll tell you how I know, but only if you consent to lie down and turn off that awful noise."

"What-" _Oh, the TV_. "Fine."

_Fine? _ said her common sense, which sounded like a curious admixture of the serial killer now cheerfully turning off her television and preparing a stack of pillows to properly elevate her ankle, and Ardelia Mapp. _Fine, Clarice Starling? __**Really? **__Dr. Hannibal Lecter asks to come in and turn off the TV and tell you what fucked-up blood-sniffing psychic trick he uses on people and all you have to say is 'Fine?' You are one sad excuse for an FBI agent, Starling! _

Well, at the moment, it was mostly Ardelia.

"Lie down, please, Agent Starling. If you must, I will not prevent you from calling Jack Crawford and his little FBI buddies, but I must insist that you first demonstrate that you intend to take proper care of that ankle, or I cannot in good faith leave, if my departure is your wish." He showed his teeth a little. "After all, I _am _a doctor."

She complied, but couldn't resist a jibe. "I get the feeling the American Medical Association would disagree with you there, Dr. Lecter."

"Ah, yes, they would obviously prohibit me from practicing under _mon nom propre, _presuming of course that I would be able to do so without being immediately incarcerated, but my medical _degree_ cannot be revoked; they cannot strip me of my education anymore than they could erase it from my mind. "

"Uh-huh," said Clarice, sitting down. "Like you cared about your doctorly duties even when you _were _one."

"I believe we just had this discussion, Clarice."

"You know what I mean."

"_I _do, but it would be far better if you learned how to state your meaning properly."

"_So _not even close to the point."

"Do you see what I mean about stating your meaning clearly? Was there something you wanted to ask me, Agent Starling? I certainly don't recall a question."

She snorted a little. "_Yeah_, there are things I want to ask you."

"Such as?"

"For starters-"

"Toes are good."

"_What_?" Clarice twisted her head to get a look at him. He had an impish grin on his face, which, she had to say, scared her a hell of a lot more than had his little joke.

"I am terribly sorry, Agent Starling. Does it bother you to hear me discuss my _appetites_ so lightly?"

"Uh, yes?"

"Was that a question?"

"It was a contemporary rhetorical flourish, Doctor."

"Impressive."

"Thank you."

"You are quite welcome, Clarice. Now: is it my levity that bothers you, or is it the reference to the acts itself that causes you distress?"

"Um…" Clarice concentrated for a moment. "Both, I suppose."

"Because death is not funny, and murder is less so?"

"Well, yes…" _Floater, crispy critter. DOA. Another one bites the dust, eh, Starling? Nice shot, by the way…_

_Menthol under the nose and humor over the mind. _

She opened her eyes again. "Maybe not."

"Yes or no, Agent Starling, which is it?"

She inhaled sharply. "It's both, Dr. Lecter- that is, death isn't really funny, but we're all afraid of it, so we pretend it is, because that way we distance ourselves from the dead, and don't have to face our own mortality."

"Very good, Agent Starling."

She smiled a little, involuntarily, at his praise, and then swallowed the smile. _Jesus Christ, Clarice, what the hell-devil are you doing? Letting him lead you down the primrose path- you know that goes to hell, right? He told you that. Playing student and teacher was all very well and good when he was in a cell and a life was on the line, but what the fuck are you doing it for now? _

_Don't tell me you _like _it, Clarice. _

She reached under her blanket and surreptitiously checked to see if her cell phone was in her pocket. It was.

"Um, Dr. Lecter, could you excuse me for a moment?"

"I hope you aren't going to call Jacky-boy and his goons on me, Clarice. We were having _such _a nice talk."

"Oh, no…I have to use the bathroom, if you _must _know." She knew the second she said it that the mix of innocence and sarcasm in one sentence would set him off like a human lie detector.

"Tsk, tsk, Clarice," he said, moving quick as a vampire to place his hand firmly on her sternum and keep her from getting up. "It's terribly bad form to call the FBI on your guests."

"You came here, remember?" she asked, struggling in vain against his hand. _Pathetic, Starling, really, truly pathetic. _

"And you invited me into your home."

"And what would you do if a serial killer showed up on _your _doorstep?"

"Well, that would depend, of course."

"_Depend_?"

"If he was like our old friend Buffalo Bill, I should have to say I would invite him in, incapacitate him in some way, likely by hitting him over the head with a blunt object, and, after suitable preparation, of course, have him for dinner."

"Of fucking course you would," Clarice muttered.

"Language, Agent Starling."

"English, Dr. Lecter."

"Your badinage has improved quite nicely."

"I have a very good interlocutor."

"Ah, a veiled compliment and a vocabulary word! I approve."

"I admit that I am not as intelligent as you are, Doctor, but you seem to have confused the University of Virginia with beauty school."

"That was a little cruel of me, wasn't it? I apologize."

"Take your hand off my manubrium and we'll call it even."

"Anatomy lessons, too?"

She gave him her fiercest glare, and he removed his hand but stayed on the couch beside her.

"Thank you," she said, attempting to regain her dignity.

"You are very welcome, Clarice."

She was quiet for a moment. "You said I could ask you something?"

"I don't believe I said that, no."

"You implied it."

"Yes."

"So…"

"What did I tell you about clarity?"

"Fine. May I ask you something?"

"Of course. You may ask me whatever you wish, and I may or may not respond."

"'Kay. So, um…what are you doing here, Dr. Lecter?"

"I wanted to visit you."

"You said you wouldn't."

"I implied that I would not hurt you, and that remains accurate, do you not agree?"

"I do…but-"

"Ah, no. Now it is my turn to ask a question, or have you forgotten the rules?"

Clarice sat up, annoyed. "Seriously?"

"Lie down, Agent Starling. I am not joking, no, but this is a game, so it isn't terribly serious, I don't think. I am, however, extremely serious about the negative effect on your health should you continue to get so excited about everything I say."

"Excited?"

He chuckled. Her accent had started to come back a little. "Not sexually, Clarice, but, come to think of it, why did you jump to that conclusion? Have I- poked- a soft spot?"

"Is that awful pun your question?"

"No, as I don't expect you know yourself, and even if you do, I don't think you'll answer me. To return to our previous topic of discussion: why does it bother you so when I make reference to my alleged criminal acts?"

"Why don't _you _call them what they are?"

"You are not obeying the rules, Agent Starling."

"You're a psychiatrist, Doctor. What do you think that little change of subject means?"

"Whatever your refusal to answer the question means, Agent Starling."

"Fine. I do not know, Doctor Lecter, but I sense you have a theory. Please, enlighten me on what lurks in the depths of my twisted psyche."

"You really are not playing fair, Clarice."

"Stop acting coy and say what you think already."

"All right. Does it bother you that you can sit here and converse with me, even enjoy the conversation, laugh, make jokes, et-cetera, even with what you know about me?"

"Yes. It does."

"Why? Does my presence make you uncomfortable, or is it the awareness that you know what I've done and _it doesn't bother you_ that disturbs you? "

"I think you're the one breaking the rules now, Doctor," Clarice said in a strained voice.

"And you're the one evading questions."

"You still haven't said it."

"Said what, Agent Starling?"

"_Cannibalism_, Dr. Lecter." She spit out the word like a piece of bad meat.

There was silence for a moment. She looked at him, afraid he might be angry, that she might have pushed too far, but his eyes were calm, fixed on hers, as if sizing her up, altering his perception of her. Finally, he smiled, showing his teeth. "A good word, isn't it? Conjures up the Fore people of New Guinea or savages dancing round a pot somewhere in darkest Africa, doesn't it? It comes to us from Christopher Columbus, actually; it's what he took down as the Caribe people's name for themselves."

"I didn't ask for an etymology lecture, Doctor," she said, her voice still harsh with irritation.

"You did not, in fact, ask for anything." And he was tranquil as Valium, of course.

"That your way of saying I still have a question?"

"_Is _that, Clarice, and yes, it is."

"Okay. Why do you care whether or not I care about what you've done?"

"I don't."

"That's a lie and you know it."

"That was a convoluted question, and you know it."

"Immaterial."

"Oh, getting into the high syllable count now, are we?"

"Hmm, reflexive bastardliness. Getting defensive?"

"Language!"

"Deal with it."

"I don't object to your profanity in this case, Clarice, but your usage of the term 'bastard' is incorrect."

She cocked her head and her eyes went wide with false innocence. "You sure?"

"If you are trying to upset me, you'll have to do quite a bit better than questioning my parentage at this late date, Agent Starling."

"Tell me why you care what I think about your…"

"Cannibalism?"

"Yes."

"If my presence is repulsive to you, I shall go. That is all."

"It's not." The words came before she could think, lurking where she hadn't seen them coming until they'd shot out of her mouth and into the air.

His eyebrows went up: false surprise. "Really? You find my presence pleasant, then?"

"I didn't say that."

"You have not yet denied it, either."

She grinned. "Evasion seems to be our theme today, Doctor."

He leaned back against the nubby fabric of her old couch, eyes closed, and made a _moue _of distaste as the back of his neck touched a particularly worn spot. "Indeed. You need new furniture, Clarice."

"I need an answer to my next question, Doctor."

"First you need to ask it."

"Why do you do it?"

"'It,' Clarice? You can't possibly expect me to answer a question so vaguely phrased as to be meaningless, can you?"

"Why. Do. You. Eat. People?"

He made a slurping noise with his tongue. "They. Taste. Gooooood," he mocked, bringing her to his face, showing her his teeth. She blinked hard, but didn't flinch. "Brave Clarice," he said, and sat back again.

"Fine," she said, "don't answer. I'll ask you something else."

"Cheating."

"Answer it, then."

"Fine, ask something else."

"Getting cranky? Do we need a nap?"

"You may, Clarice. I am merely irritated by your juvenile attempts to goad me."

"Apparently they aren't so juvenile as to be ineffective."

He showed his teeth again. "True."

"All right," she said at last, biting her lip in concentration. "Okay- what makes you different, Doctor?"

"Whatever do you mean, Clarice?"

"You helped me catch Buffalo Bill; you talked about him with…disdain. Why not sympathize with him?"

"The simple answer is that you were more interesting to me than he was."

Her eyebrows went up, but she did not take the bait. "That implies that there is a complicated answer."

He watched her silently store his remark, saving it, contemplating it, and smiled to himself. "Yes."

"I would like to hear it, please."

"You're learning quickly, Clarice."

"The answer, Dr. Lecter."

"It can be best summed up as choice."

"I didn't ask for a summary."

"The actual explanation involves two languages, Nietzsche, and Sartre."

"Are you implying that my intellect is not up to the task of understanding?"

"Not at all. I simply did not wish to bore you if, as they say, philosophy is not your 'cup of tea.'"

"Thanks for the consideration," she said, and waited.

"Fine. But I warn you, it is not brief."

"And I am not Polonius."

"Clever girl."

"Evading."

"All right. One. I accept my actions for what they are; I do not define them either positively or negatively in relation to any moral code. I act in good faith- _bon foi- _with myself and my desires. I do not force myself into an arbitrary moral box; I act out of will, out of desire, and nothing else. Read Sartre on _mal foi_, _s'il vous plait_."

"I have, actually."

Now Hannibal's eyebrows rose. "Re-ally?"

"You seem to have some kind of selective memory loss thing about the fact that I did go to college."

"On the contrary. I should not like you very much if you were unable to hold up your end of the conversation."

"So many implications, so little time. Your answer is hardly complete, Doctor; I didn't ask what Jean Paul Sartre thought."

"As you wish. My '_bon foi_' is something which distinguishes me not only from those you might designate as 'my kind,' but also from most of humanity. Most people, Agent Starling, _require _a degree of bad faith, lest they be paralyzed by lack of purpose and indecision. You see, the vast majority of the human race is deeply uncomfortable with its unguarded desires and compulsions, uncensored by petty society; some people lack the imagination to even attempt Sartrian fulfillment, such as it is. My own pet philosophical theory is that those who are capable of exhibiting good faith are what Nietzsche called _ubermenschen- _read him too, and _Crime and Punishment_, with an eye to the character Raskolnikov, who exhibits quite well why I don't respect 'my kind'-"

"Senior English class, Doctor Lecter."

"That's quite impressive for a public school in Appalachia."

"Shut the fuck up, please," said Clarice in a voice that was dangerously cordial and somehow familiar. Upon brief reflection, Lecter found that it somewhat resembled his own. Without the unnecessary cursing, obviously.

"I won't comment on your language or your upbringing further."

"Thank you."

"You are quite welcome. Now you, my dear Clarice, have, I think, the ability to become an 'uberfrau,' but currently you are trapped in quite the little quagmire of bad faith. You believe that you owe something to the FBI, that you owe society some intangible 'good,' or perhaps you owe your dear, dead, daddy the fulfillment of the desires he failed to attain."

"Doctor Lecter, you _just _promised-"

"So I did. I do apologize for that. "

"I don't know if I can accept your apology."

"I would regret it if we could not remain friends. We are friends, are we not, Clarice?"

Something seemed to shock her back into reality, and a gauzy dreaminess peeled away from her blue eyes. "I- well, no, Doctor Lecter."

"Why not?"

"Because- you're a serial killer, and this is just- ridiculous!"

"Why, Clarice, why is it ridiculous that we should be friends?" It wasn't a genuine question; he was coaxing, fishing for a reaction. She knew it but she was so full to the mouth of emotion that she spoke anyway, giving him what he wanted, talking right into his trap.

"This whole conversation is ridiculous!"

"But why? Because of my actions? Or because of your dearly held beliefs, your precious little 'society?'"

"Because normal people don't have cannibals sitting around talking Sartre in their living rooms!"

"Ah. 'Normal people.' Tell me, Clarice, who are these 'normal people'?"

"Well- everyone else."

"Ignoring the vagueness of that answer, what use would it be to be just like 'everyone else,' Clarice? Average? Mediocre? Dare I say _stupid_?"

"You wouldn't be sitting here giving me a headache," she muttered.

"Would you like some ibuprofen?"

"No, thanks."

"Something stronger?"

"As a doctor, you're kind of irresponsible."

"I told you I wasn't to be allowed to practice."

"Oh, yes. It's so irrational to forbid a psychiatrist who not only ate his patients but once told one under the influence of narcotics that _he _provided that he ought to rip off his own face and feed it to his dogs to practice medicine!"

"You've been reading my file. I'm flattered, Agent Starling." He tsk-ed a little. "Unfortunately, I think Mr. Verger's predicament is rather his own doing, don't you? One always has a choice, no? He didn't have to take those drugs, and certainly he did not have to listen to me."

"You were his doctor!"

"And so society would say he ought to listen to and trust me. This is exactly what I'm talking about, Clarice; acting not because doing so will obtain any outcome you desire but because you think it is how you are supposed to act, what you are supposed to do, within society. You believe you should act in this manner because it is the best way to become that which you wish to become and to do that which you wish to do. Your flaw here is in believing that you must settle for goals considered acceptable in society. In fact, society is detrimental."

His tongue tripped down the word like Humbert Humbert savoring the syllables of Lolita.

"I like being an FBI agent," said Clarice. "It allows me to satisfy what I'm sure you'd call my repressed desire to shoot at people and benefit society at the same time. I think I recall Sartre having something to say about that, too?"

"Shooting people?"

"If it involved sacrificing the personal for the good of society, yes."

"Ah, _vous avez lu __Les Jeux Sont Faits_, _ma chere Clarice. Bon ! __"_

"I speak Spanish, Dr. Lecter."

"Ah, yes. I forget sometimes, I'm afraid- French was once an essential language, the common tongue of Europe's elite. But America has never been Europe, has it? You Americans fear the word elite…"

Clarice's brows knit together. "Where are you from, Doctor Lecter?"

"Ah, is this your next question? I believe it's my turn, now."

Clarice's head dropped back against her pillow, lolling dangerously close to Lecter's shoulder.

"Fiiine," she said.

"You brought up Sartre's idea of putting society before one's personal life, Clarice. Does that have," he grinned ironically, "_personal_ resonance for you?"

"You mean because I put my work ahead of having relationships? Getting married, having kids?" She laughed low, a little meanly. "I've got news for you, Doctor Lecter- your little psychic trick backfired this time. "

He raised his eyebrows and cocked his head. "My 'little psychic trick,' Clarice?"

"Oh, you damn well know what I mean." Clarice was past the point of caring whether he got mad at her. Having a serial killer sitting on her couch was surreal enough; not since the very first day they met had she seriously considered the possibility that Lecter would kill her.

"That's true." He considered her for a moment. "How did it backfire?"

"Simply because I'm a career woman in my thirties who isn't married doesn't mean I harbor some burning desire for matrimony and babies. If I wanted to end up pregnant and barefoot I'd have stayed right the hell where I was. God _damn_ it," she said, getting to her feet, swaying on her injured ankle.

"Clarice-" he was on his feet in front of her, hands out and ready to catch her, before she ever saw him move. "Sit down, please."

"I think I'll call Jack instead."

"You know I will not allow you to do that, Agent Starling."

"What, are you gonna kill me? Seriously? "

"It would be unfair of me to attack you when you have invited me into your home, and have an injury to boot."

"He's here in double trust," Clarice muttered under her breath.

"Was that _Macbeth_, Agent Starling?"

She shook her head. "I'm not letting you charm me into a conversation about Shakespeare. No. You can't just sit here and insult me, in my own living room, I won't- _damn_."

"Calm down, Clarice. You really shouldn't be increasing your heart rate in this condition."

A stab of pain throbbed through her ankle and she began to fall, unable to protest when he grabbed her by the biceps and maneuvered her back onto the couch. He peeled back the bandage from around her ankle and made his characteristic tsk-ing noise. "Oh, Clarice, what have you been doing to yourself? This isn't very good, not at all."

"What…"

"You need something a bit stronger than what they've given you, I'm afraid. " Hannibal clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, thinking. "I'll get you some vancomycin."

"I can just go to the hospital…"

"No. " He closed his eyes in thought. "Too many variables."

"So…" she was getting sluggish, having a little difficulty propping herself up. "You're going to steal some."

He smiled. "It won't take but a minute," he said, imitating her accent. "I'll give you something for the pain, first."

Clarice obediently took the pills she was given, and the next thing she knew, she was staring at the inside of her eyelids.


	2. Saline Flush

**A/N: Okay, so if you were expecting another 13-pager…sorry. Oh, and the allusions in the first chapter, in case you care. Also, if you intend to read **_**Crime and Punishment**_** and don't wish to know the ending, don't read number 3. **

**Jean Paul Sartre was a French existentialist and contemporary of Albert Camus. His brand of existentialism was particularly concerned with the idea of authenticity, something he believed came solely through individual life experience. The idea of bad faith that Hannibal talks about is linked up with the idea of true freedom as a burden. An example of bad faith (taken from **_**my **_**senior English class) would be: "Why do you want to go to college?" If you want to go to college because you desire that experience in itself, not simply because it is a means to an end (for example, getting into med school, becoming a doctor) that would be good faith. If you want to go to college to get a "good" job to make money and live well in society, but not for the value of those experiences themselves or because you really want to, but because you're **_**supposed **_**to, because it's your "role," that's bad faith. Also, curiously, Sartre was concerned with something he called "things in themselves" and "being-in-itself," which reminds me of a certain someone quoting Marcus Aurelius…but that's just me. **

**Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher probably most famous for declaring God dead. Nietzsche disliked traditional, Judeo-Christian morality and thought values should be based in "the vital impulses of life itself," as Wikipedia has it (sorry, my actual Nietzsche is already packed up for college). Nietzsche believed that the "will to power" was the fundamental human drive, even above the will to live propagated by Schopenhauer. The idea Hannibal discusses is the ubermensch (German literally translated to "over-human"), something Nietzsche wrote of as the next step in human evolution. The interpretation Hannibal uses is mainly the Dostoevskyan one, even though Dostoevsky wrote long before Nietzsche…**

**The idea Dostoevsky discusses through the character of Raskolnikov in **_**Crime and Punishment **_**is similar to Nietzsche's ubermensch and for the purposes of shorthand is often referred to using Nietzsche's terminology. Raskolnikov wants to prove himself above conventional morality, mainly by arguing that for a man above other men, anything, including murder, is permissible in the pursuit of a higher goal (basically, anything such a superior man might want). He compares himself to Napoleon. Raskolnikov intends to accomplish this by murdering an elderly pawnbroker (and, accidentally, her innocent sister) whom he calls a "parasite," and whom he argues it is permissible to kill because she is, through financial means, hindering the progress of a greater man (him). Hannibal dislikes Raskolnikov because Raskolnikov quite rapidly proves that he is not such an ubermensch. He becomes furiously guilty, descends into madness, is terrified of the police and of society, and desires to confess about half the time. A true ubermensch would not feel himself subject to the justice of a society he considers beneath him, and certainly would not feel guilty, and would most **_**decidedly **_**not go crazy over it all. Also, at the end Raskolnikov gives himself up, repents, and finds Jesus…all things I doubt Hannibal would be too crazy about. **

**Polonius is a character in Shakespeare's **_**Hamlet **_**who, during an ironically long-winded speech, states that "Brevity is the soul of wit"- thus Clarice indicating that she wants the long answer by telling Hannibal that she is not Polonius. **

**In Act I, scene 7, Macbeth tells his wife that he is not going to go through with their plan to kill King Duncan, who is staying at their home, stating: "He is here in double trust: First, as I am his kinsman and his subject, strong both against the deed: then, as his host, who should against his murderer shut the door, not bear the knife himself!" (Of course, the marvelous Lady Macbeth then convinces her feckless husband otherwise). **

**Disclaimer: So not mine it's not even funny. **

**And now…the story! Yay! **

Clarice's head felt heavier than a pick-up bed full of bricks. She opened her eyes, ever so slowly, and blinked twice.

_What. The. Fuck_?

This was definitely not her couch. It wasn't even her bed. And the silk nightgown- if you could call it that- was _most definitely _not hers.

Neither was the man next to her. At least, _she _didn't think so. She rolled over to get a better look.

_Shit_. _Fuck. Damn. FUCK_.

He opened his eyes. "Hello, Clarice."

_What the hell? _Clarice thought, but for some reason she smiled and stretched and said, "Hi."

He smiled back and she found herself thinking that he had a nice smile, when he wasn't baring his teeth at her to make a point. And then she found herself thinking something else, something she really had no place in hell thinking, but she leaned over anyway-

And found herself flailing, almost falling off the couch.

From across the room, Hannibal regarded her in amusement. "Welcome to the land of the living, Agent Starling."

"Uh, yeah, hi," she said, unable to look him in the eyes. _Damn damn damn damn he's going to notice, shit, fuck, stupid subconscious, stupid psychology, I swear to God_—

"Did you have pleasant dreams?"

Was she imagining it, or was there a glint in his eye when he said the word 'pleasant'?

"One might say that," she answered, careful as a lawyer.

"Revelatory? You know what Sigmund Freud had to say about dreams."

"Screw Freud."

His eyebrows rose and he laughed. "Indeed."

Clarice moved to run a hand through her hair, and stopped when she felt a surprising twinge. She glanced down to see rubber tubing protruding from the top of her left hand.

"What the fuck?"

"I apologize for putting the IV in your hand, Clarice. You really don't have very good veins, I'm afraid. It was a rather difficult procedure."

"IV? Dr. Lecter, I don't remember agreeing to an IV."

"I don't remember asking your opinion on the subject."

Clarice began tugging at the tape on her hand. "Fine. I'll just take the damn thing out then."

"No, you will not. It's an antibiotic. You need it if you want to keep your foot."

She stopped and stared at him, unable to tell whether he was serious. _Goddamn it_. He smiled politely back at her, knowing he'd won. _Fuck you and your stupid smiling. _

"It's a forty-eight hour course of vancomycin, which should eliminate the infection even if it's methicillin-resistant _Staphylococcus aureus_."

She gave him a blank look that was only half sarcastic.

"MRSA."

"That's just fucking great."

"Clarice, I have been inclined to excuse your bad language on the grounds of grogginess, pain, and shock, but I'm afraid such leniency will only extend so far."

"It's my goddamn house."

"And I am your guest."

"I think we've had this discussion."

He gave her a pained look. "You will be forced to endure my company until the antibiotics are through, I'm afraid, so you might at least try to be polite."

She rolled her eyes. "Okay. I am _so _sorry, Dr. Lecter, that you showed up uninvited to my house, held me hostage on my couch, stole my TV remote, and then drugged me so you could hook me up to more drugs on the IV equipment that you stole from the local hospital. Does that about cover it?" She answered her own question. "Oh, wait. I've forgotten the part where you had to steal the stuff from a hospital because you're not allowed to be a real doctor anymore BECAUSE YOU'RE A FUCKING SERIAL KILLER_." _

"Your point would have been made equally well without the addition of that foul gerund, Clarice."

She lay her head back against the pillow, exhausted, and stuck out her tongue.

"I am going to forgive you that indiscretion because I realize that you are quite ill and may be a bit delusional."

"You are absolutely infuriating. Has anyone ever told you how annoying you are?" she demanded, too tired and exasperated to care who exactly she was yelling at.

He stared at her for a moment in genuine surprise, and then began to laugh, a laugh that seemed weirdly unfamiliar coming from him. It took her a moment to realize that she had never heard him laugh without mocking someone.

"Actually, no," he said. "No, no one has ever told me how 'annoying' I am, perhaps because I am, as you so indelicately put it, 'a fucking serial killer.'" He wrinkled his nose a bit in distaste.

"Whatever," she said. "I carry a gun and that doesn't seem to stop anyone from staring at my-" _now _Clarice realized to whom she was speaking and cut herself off, blushing a little.

"Hmm?" he prodded. "Finish your sentence, please, Clarice."

"Um, no…Dr. Lecter, if you recall, I believe it's my turn to ask a question."

"I believe Dr. Freud might have had a wee something to say about your avoidance of the subject."

"Well, I believe Dr. Freud was a drug-addicted nymphomaniac who just projected his perversions onto everyone else. What do you think about that?"

He grinned, not nicely. "Is that your question?"

"No. That was another rhetorical flourish."

"Very effective."

"Thank you. My actual question is, where are you from?"

"Your dogged persistence, even extending through a brief coma as it has, is astounding, Agent Starling."

She merely gave him a cool look, copied straight out of his own playbook-- a fact she probably didn't realize.

He chuckled. "I am from Lithuania." He watched her try to place it on a map, and after a moment either took pity on her or got bored with watching her squirm. She'd put money on the latter. "Northeast of Poland, northwest of Belarus, south of Latvia."

"Oh."

"You likely just learned the Soviet Union as a large, grey mass in school, correct?"

She looked a little abashed. "Yeah…it was actually just a black block in the textbook."

"Very subtle."

"I think our geography teacher thought we were all going to get blown to smithereens any minute, anyway, so I doubt he considered we'd ever need more information."

He laughed outright again. "What a fatalistic approach to education!"

She gave him a crooked grin. "I'm surprised you're so shocked, Doctor."

"What do you mean?"

"It was just a public school in Appalachia, after all."

"Why, Clarice, what a thing to imply about your own home!"

She glared, but without intensity. "Shut up and ask your da- your next question."

"You exhibit a curious lack of fear around me."

"That is not a question, Doctor Lecter."

"Indeed, no. It's an observation. My question is why that is so, given that, as you have taken care to express multiple times, you are quite aware that-"

"Yes, yes, you're a fucking serial killer. I won't make you say the dreaded f-word again."

"You are too kind, Agent Starling."

She made a derisive snorting sound. "Uh huh."

He gave her a prompting look.

"Allright. Why aren't I afraid of you? Hm. I don't really know, I guess. I got accustomed to you when you weren't really a threat to me. Being behind your glass and all."

She didn't look at him when she mentioned the incarceration. He wasn't the only one who recognized a soft spot. He was just the only one who, having found it, would purposely mash it in like a baby's fontanelle. He and Lady Macbeth.

"I don't think so," he said in measuring tones. "You were _nervous_ your first day, of course you were, but more leery of disappointing our little friend Jack than of me, I think."

"Yes," she said, closing her eyes and calling up the dank dungeon, the stone walls gleaming in the harsh light, almost as if they would be damp to the touch. "Also, after Miggs, you just weren't all that scary."

"Touche, mademoiselle."

"Well, you didn't _seem _scary, in comparison."

"I made an effort."

"Why?"

"That is the question, isn't it?"

"Uh, yes."

"In order to be more frightening, in point of fact. The subversion of expectations is always more terrifying that merely meeting them."

"The devil you know."

"Exactly. Acting insane sets people off balance only when it is unexpected. To act insane in a mental asylum is no fun at all."

Clarice thought back again to their first meeting. No, a polite 'Good morning' had not been what she had expected at _all._ "But…"

"You were not the only one who wanted something, Agent Starling."

Her brows furrowed.

"You look surprised."

"Yes…"

"Any time there is a change in one's environment, any time patterns shift, new and differing opportunities present themselves, you know. You presented a change in environment and a shift in patterns. This holds true for you as well, Clarice. I shifted the pattern you expected by presenting myself as I did. Reversals of expectations reveal those expectations and often reveal other things, as well."

"Is that your little psychic trick?"

He smiled again, this one half cruel, half amused. "One of them. I believe it's my turn now, correct?"

"Correct."

"Why did you choose profiling, Agent Starling?"

"I thought you already told me the answer to that."

"Law enforcement, yes. Profiling itself, no."

"Huh," Clarice muttered to herself, trying to remember when she had set her mind so fiercely on Behavioral Sciences. "I knew I wanted to be in the FBI from when I was a little girl…but BSU, I don't know. I can't remember."

"Do you suppose it was because you found that you were very good at it?"

"I imagine that was part of it…" She _was _good at it, very good. She recalled the surprise of her psych professor, freshman year at UVA, when he heard she had never taken a class on the subject before…

"Did you even begin to second guess yourself sometimes, Clarice? Did you think the conclusions you had drawn were too facile, came too easily?"

"Yes—yes, I did…things sometimes seemed too simple to be true…"

_Much of psychology is puerile_. He'd said that. _Being smart spoils a lot of things, doesn't it, Clarice? _Yes, yes, it did, and he would know: there were times she could read intentions so clearly it was as though she was reading minds. Which was all well and good for profiling a serial killer, but could make things really awkward on a first date.

"But they were true, weren't they?"

"Yes."

"You understand how I feel, then."

"No, Doctor Lecter, I don't think I do. "

"Your objection is to the word _feel_, isn't it?"

"I suppose so, yes. I do not understand how you feel, if you do the things you do, and yet still can feel-"

"You're beginning to go in circles, Agent Starling." He checked the watch at his wrist with complete nonchalance, just as though she hadn't just been implying that he was a sociopath. "Time for a saline flush, I think."

She watched him bustle about behind her head out of the corners of her eyes. He moved to her side, a vial of clear liquid in his hand, and quickly, easily made adjustments to the cluster of plastic and rubber on her hand, slipped the syringe in, and flushed the line.

She gave a little intake of breath as a cool sensation rushed up her arm, as though her veins had been abruptly filled with ice water.

"Does that hurt?"

"No…it feels…"

"Interesting?"

"Yes. Cold…like getting my ears pierced, or stitches."

"Most people find those things painful."

"Not after the first prick."

His eyebrows rose, but he let the innuendo hang.

She closed her eyes in mute embarrassment, but a thought rushed up, unbidden: _serial killers and sociopaths in general often experiment, on themselves or others…_

_Was that why he'd asked her? Was he storing her responses for his own knowledge, or prodding her down the same path, towards the core of her that was like him? Did she have that core? _

The curiosity that had welled up around her when the cool liquid slipped into her veins made her worry; the new understanding that her easy mastery of psychology was like his own frightened her too.

But what frightened her most, when she tried to objectively examine her feelings, was that she was not nearly as concerned about this as she should have been.

**A/N # 2: Dun dun dun! Not nearly as many allusions this time. I can only think of a couple…**

**Lady Macbeth, also in Act I Scene 7, in convincing Macbeth to go ahead with their murderous plot, says "I have given suck, and know how tender it is to love the babe that milks me. I would, while it was smiling in my face, have plucked my nipple from its boneless gums and dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you have done to this!" Aren't we glad I spent so much time in Senior English memorizing disturbing passages from **_**Macbeth **_**so I could put them to such good use? **

**The only other thing is that Anthony Hopkins discusses how he reverses expectations in that first scene where Hannibal appears in **_**Silence of the Lambs **_**in an interview for **_**The Making of Silence of the Lambs **_**on YouTube. Clearly I have an extremely fulfilling and productive social life in the summer. **


	3. Nos Moutons

**Notes **_**au fond**_**. **_**Nous retournons aux nos moutons**_**. ****Aaaand I am a terrible human being. **

"Are you hungry?"

"You already asked your question."

The eyebrows went up. She was beginning to be able to tell when he was making that face without even looking.

"Someone's a little rigid," he said.

Clarice did the mental version of biting her lip, her mind on the edge of thinking a terrible pun that she didn't even want anywhere near her neurons. _No_, she told herself severely, as if covering her ears and humming, _No, no, no, no, NO. Don't even _go _there, Starling. Why do you keep _doing_ this? Jesus Christ. _

"Irritated, a little, yes."

"Because I put an IV in your hand without asking? I _am _sorry about that, but wouldn't you rather be here than in a hospital? They're _so _unpleasant."

"Your perceptions may have been colored by the _type _of hospital you were in, Doctor."

"Now, that wasn't a very nice thing to bring up, was it, Agent Starling?"

She was beginning to pick up on a pattern. He called her Agent Starling when he referred to her work, their meeting, or when he was pissed at her. Huh, well. Two could play at that.

"Whatever do you mean, Hannibal? I don't know what type of hospital you did your residency in."

"You are so forward and disingenuous, all at once, Clarice, I hardly know what to do."

"You never asked permission to use my name."

"You never asked permission to invade my privacy."

"There's no expectation of privacy in a prison, and you didn't have to speak to me!"

"Are we having a lovers' spat, Agent Starling?"

She seethed at him. "If I didn't have an IV in my hand, I would slap you."

"Oooh, indeed? Then it appears we are." He gave her a shrug of feigned helplessness. "It is the traditional cultural significance of the gesture you have suggested."

"God! You're _incorrigible_."

"A five syllable word? How ni-ice."

"Aren't you going to reprimand me for my bad language again?"

"I have no aversion to your calling on whatever antiquated deity you please, Clarice."

"Oh, that's not what I was doing, and you know it."

"Correct. You have always relied on your gun rather than any god, something which I find quite refreshing on some levels."

"Some?"

"Well, it is a gun, and with your temperament, it does get a bit worrisome on occasion. For example, were you not incapacitated, I would be slightly concerned for my personal safety at the moment."

"Only slightly?"

He made a noncommittal movement with his head.

"You have a knife, don't you? Right now?"

He gave an enigmatic little smile.

"You do!" She didn't know why she was so surprised, even a little horrified. _You know what he is, Starling. Did you forget? Did you _want _to? _"Have you…used it…recently?"

"Don't worry, Clarice. I have already told you I'm not going to hurt you, and, besides, as I have been asked many times, my mother did in fact teach me not to play with my food."

"Oh, _that's _nice."

"Contrary to popular belief, I _do_ try."

"If you said you were trying to give me a headache, I'd believe you."

"Do you need an analgesic, Clarice?"

"Should I be offended?"

He grinned. "It's a painkiller. From the Greek-"

"See, if you'd quit doing things like that, I wouldn't need one."

"Doing things like educating you? I am _deeply _sorry."

"Sarcasm doesn't sit well on you, Doctor."

"Oh, we're retreating to formality now, Agent Starling? I thought we were _friends_." The upward whine and exaggerated dipthong on the last word were accompanied by an only slightly malicious smile.

Clarice was not pleased. "Well, what are you going to do when Ardelia comes back here and checks up on me? Hide in the closet? What'll you do if I tell her? We've both got guns, you know."

"Please, do you take me for a fool? First of all, your side arm is upstairs in the drawer of your bedside table, along with the weapon you customarily keep at your ankle. Your pocketknife is on the kitchen counter. Also, Miss Mapp will not be coming home this evening."

"If you hurt her I swear to God I will kill you, knife or no knife."

"That would be ill-advised, Agent Starling."

She was standing now, moving to remove her IV, her blood thick in her ears, her heartbeat coming so fast she was sure any second she'd hear it stop short. "What the _fuck _did you do?"

He stilled her hand with his own. "Miss Mapp is unhurt, Clarice. She has simply received a phone call from one Doctor Shelley, informing her that her grandmother has been involved in an accident and that she must set out for New York right away. There will be no time for her to stop by; in fact, she must already be driving."

Clarice's fingers stopped their futile work. She sat down limply and allowed Doctor Lecter to fix the tape on her hand without protest.

"Doctor Shelley," she said, flatly. "As in Mary Shelley, the author of _Frankenstein_?" She laughed a little. "Very good, Doctor. The eponymous character- usually called Dr. Frankenstein, though the title is not given him in the novel- creates a monster who, upon being rejected by his maker, sets out to destroy his loved ones. Very nice."

"Smart Clarice," said Lecter, smiling.

"Not smart enough, I guess," she muttered ruefully.

"Too smart for your FBI, if that is the connection you intend to make."

"No, I'm not. If I were smart I wouldn't have done Crawford any favors, is what I meant."

"You regret our meeting? That's not a very nice thing to say, Clarice."

"No—not that. Well…sometimes. You taught me a lot, but the rest of it, that case…" she shook her head, sighing, and Lecter's eyes tracked the swinging movement of her ponytail. "A lot of nightmares and nothing much to wake up to, either," she finished.

"Your lambs still scream?" he asked.

She pulled the ponytail holder out of her hair and ran her hands desperately through the thick mass. "Sometimes." _Goddamn, I do not fucking want to talk about dreams with him. _

_So what do you want to talk about, Starling? Opera? Cuisine? _

And now her internal monologue was back to sounding like him. _Fucking brilliant. _

"I could make them stop, Clarice." His eyes were fever-bright, but every muscle was still, controlled. She mashed her lips together, hard.

"How?" The one word emerged hard and strangled- _finger of birth-strangled babe, ditch-delivered by a drab- _more fucking _Macbeth _ran through her head, what the hell was it even doing there, didn't she have more important things to keep in her mind? _Jesus Christ_- and she went for it. "How could you, when you- you said nothing happened to you, _you _happened, but you and I both know what we are is a combination of genetics and environment, Doctor Lecter- without good reflexes and, yeah, my father's influence, I wouldn't be an FBI agent. You've got something makes you scream at night, too, don't you? _Don't you_?" Her voice melded with his in her head, and when she stopped, heart pounding, ankle throbbing, cheeks going red and hot as her capillaries filled with blood, his face was the only thing that made her sure she had spoken.

He stared at her, eyes dilated. She couldn't tell whether he had made them that way intentionally or not. She'd seen him do it before. His nostrils were drawn in, though he wasn't pulling any air through them. His eyebrows were high, his mouth a line.

For the first time, he frightened her, and she, with her eyes as bright as his had been, her hair wild as a maenad's and her hands clutching air like claws—if she didn't frighten him, she at least _surprised _him, perhaps even _shocked _him, and that was a rare occurrence itself.

There was a long moment of silence. Outside, it was twilight, and they could both hear the tree frogs and crickets begin a hymn to the dark woodsy night.

"How do you make it go away?" she asked finally, hoarsely. "The screaming--"

He turned away from her for a moment, and when he looked back, he was composed again, except a haunting that lurked at the bottoms of his eyes, wells deep and inky as oubliettes.

"If you close your eyes, and you find the lambs, Clarice, you must pick them up, one by one, and put them very far away, in the darkest, deepest corner of your mind, and shut them in there."

Her eyes were closed tight. "I won't be able to hear them?"

_Sometimes, _he thought, _muffled is the best one can ask for_. "No," he said, and immediately reflected that he had broken two rules for her.

He had lied, and he had ended a sentence with a preposition, albeit only in his head. She was _not _having a good effect on him, he thought, and could not help a small smile at the idea. Or perhaps she was. On further reflection, he could not recall smiling so much in a very, very long time.

**A/N: I think Clarice explains **_**Frankenstein **_**pretty well. Ummm. **_**Autres choses**_**? I don't see any. The **_**Macbeth **_**reference is an ingredient in the witches' stew. Act and scene escape me. Maenads: Women in Greek mythology who worship the god Dionysus (of: wine, partying, goats, and with harvest associations) and who tore Orpheus apart after his failed attempt to rescue Eurydice from Hades. Oh. The bit at the top is "We return to our mutton," which means, "We go back to the business at hand," but…yes. Yes, I am a terrible, terrible person. I apologize deeply for my depravity. That's a lie. I don't. ******

**Disclaimer: As usual, emphatically not mine. **


	4. Ratiocination

**A/N: Sorry for the delay. College happened. And then my computer broke. That was a good time. Anyway, I hope this chapter was worth waiting for.**

**Disclaimer: Does not belong to me. **

Clarice awoke slowly and groggily, her vision fuzzy, ears muffled, hands heavy. Her head felt full of ether-soaked cotton. She loathed falling asleep during the day, and avoided it whenever it possible, a task usually made simple by her work. (Okay, fine, so she usually just plain didn't sleep. Which clearly had no bearing on her falling asleep so easily on the couch…God _damn _it).

Unless it wasn't her fault. _Damn it Starling, if he drugged you, you call Crawford RIGHT NOW. You hear? _

God, she wished her inner voice would just pick a _side, _already. As it was, it wasn't helping her headache any.

She had known immediately upon waking that he was no longer in the room with her, but she knew he was in the house. She could smell him. She grinned a little at the thought, but her eternally honest inner voice, which, despite the odd admixture of Ardelia and Lecter that it was, had also apparently been raised by Lutherans, chided her.

Fine, so she couldn't smell _him_. She could smell what he was _doing_. _Oh, shut the _fuck _up, Starling. _

"Agent Starling? Are you awake?" he called from the kitchen, sounding cheerful. _Fuck. _

She did not like it when he was cheerful. Also, him calling out to her like that meant that he had heard the minute noises of her waking, and _that _pissed her off.

"No," she growled, and kicked off the blanket she found herself tangled in. Oh, so he'd tried to be all _nice _and shit? Well, that wasn't going to fucking fly.

_What did he even do to you? _

_The fact that you're asking yourself that question about a serial killer is a testament to how disturbed you are, Starling. You need therapy-- DO NOT EVEN THINK IT. NO. _

Too late.

"Don't act like a petulant child," he said. He poked his head through the kitchen doorway. "Do you have any thyme?"

"My ankle's busted and I'm hooked up to an IV run by Dr. Evil. I've got nothing _but _time."

"Very funny on both counts."

"I wasn't trying to be funny."

A long stare between the two of them, Clarice holding her own against the eyes that terrified police, psychiatrists, men of twice her size and education; eyes that had been the last flash of vision before the stern'st goodnight (It was _so _not her fault that Ardelia had dragged her to a performance of _Macbeth _downtown and then made her watch the Roman Polanski film. Twice.).

Finally, he smiled a little at her, a graceful bowing out—(she thought, cynically, that because she did not sweat under his gaze, he gleaned no pain, no fear—no _entertainment_—from her glaring back)—and, inclining his head to her, asked if she was hungry.

Her reflex was to say no, but her stomach felt awkward and empty, as though it had been blown full of air. "Am I still going to be if you tell me what's in it?"

He laughed. "Unless you have something against eggs and bacon."

"_You _made eggs and bacon?"

"Well—omelettes and prosciutto."

"Hah. I knew you couldn't make normal-people food."

"Perhaps I simply have no desire to make what you refer to as 'normal-people food,' Clarice. And I happen to think that omelettes and prosciutto are both perfectly normal foods."

"Everything's relative, Doctor," she said nastily.

"Would you prefer the rotten Canadian bacon in your crisper, left over from about the time we first met? Or perhaps you would like it better if I made you some of my _special _bacon. Is that what you wanted, Clarice? Are you disappointed?"

"No, I'm _annoyed_."

"Ah. Why?"

"Because apparently psychiatrists learn their techniques from two-year olds."

"Your refusal to be intimidated by a vast education and impeccable credentials is quite refreshing."

She examined his face, trying to detect traces of sarcasm. Finding none, she cocked her head hesistantly. "Well, you have a little more to work with when it comes to intimidation, Doctor. Like your knife."

_And teeth_, she thought, but curiously the idea gave her no pause, no urge to shudder. He was no vampire. All he did, she could do herself.

Not, you know, that she _wanted _to. But she'd been surprised before at what she was capable of, when the situation required.

Not that most situations require gourmet or predatory cannibalism, she reminded herself, a tad sharply. _But murder—killing? There are plenty of situations that _require _that, and quite a few more where it ought to be acceptable. _

And now she was sounding like him again, inside her head. _Great. Fucking great. You don't mean that, Starling. _

And really, she didn't. She _hated _shooting people. For weeks, maybe a month, afterward, she woke up feeling like she was in some inescapable nightmare, full of dread every second, even when she wasn't consciously thinking about it. _It used to be longer, _she thought, a little of the sickness filling her now. _When you shot Buffalo Bill it was almost a year before you could wake up and not want to vomit—_**stop**.

He had his head cocked at her. She wanted to think, _like a dog, _but it was more wolfish, really; an examination before the leap for the throat. _Are you worth attacking? _

_It's almost a calculation in terms of pure calories, _she thought, and then hated herself some more.

"You have a gun," he said equably.

"Not right now."

"Still, you hardly need it to intimidate most people, Cla-rice, just yell 'FBI' and they'll panic like nymphs being chased by a goat-man."

She gave him a _look_.

"The etymology of the word 'panic'-"

"Oh, shut up, will you?" Even with the frightening looks he sometimes gave her, she was pretty confident now that he wasn't going to kill her, and absolutely sure he wasn't going to eat her, because, really, how fucking obvious would _that _one be? Anyone in the country'd be able to solve that one, thanks to the media and its perverted obsession with serial killers.

_You're really one to talk, Starling_.

"You were not thinking about my knife all that time, I hope," he said, moving—God, he _always _startled her when he moved, he could keep so damn still and then he went so _fluid_ when he took a step—to sit nearer her, on the armchair he'd moved sometime while she was sleeping to be closer. "I promised I wouldn't use it on you, and you know--"

"You always keep your word, yeah, I'd noticed."

"What were you thinking about, then, little Starling?"

"I'm not 'little' anything."

"You didn't object before."

"Before?"

His pupils dilated happily and she could tell he was going to quote to her. "Fly back to school now, little Starling."

_Oh_. _Well excuse me for not remembering every single instant of my existence. _

"Didn't figure that'd be the best way to achieve my ends," she replied instead.

"Ooh, a little Machiavellian! How charming."

"What did I _just _say about me being little?"

"That in your opinion, you are not." He gave her a smile that was somewhere between cruel and kind. "Now. What were you thinking about, .Clarice.?"

"That the media is obsessed with serial killers so you won't kill me," she said without thinking.

He cocked an eyebrow. "I think you perhaps should have used a different conjunction," he said.

"Well, because of the obsession, it'd be obvious, and everyone would know it was you, and so you won't."

"Hmmm. Because there is not one other person in the world who has proved him- or her-self capable of murder and who has some reason to dislike you, is there, Agent Starling?"

"You could never manage to kill me without making some clever joke out of it, Doctor. It's against your nature."

"I can manage to do quite a lot of things, Clarice. Including making bacon and eggs and killing without fuss or elaboration."

There was a moment of silence and stillness in the room. Clarice fidgeted and heard the sound of the blanket rustling as a buzz saw in the quiet air.

"What conjunction?" she asked.

"Hmmm?"

"What conjunction should I have used, instead of _so_?"

"_And,_ I should think." He smiled, and this time Clarice recognized the sincerity of it. "You were thinking about both things, but they are, or should have been, categorized separately, as one is not the reason for the other."

"Then what is the reason?"

"The reason I will not kill you?"

"Yes."

"Oh, Clarice, what a monster you must think me, that I should need a reason _not _to kill you."

She looked into his face, analyzing, and thought how funny that most people would think what she was doing the act of a lover, when he, perhaps only he, would recognize it as an investigation. He had a slight expression of what looked like amusement on his face, and he had made his eyes go wide.

_Playing with me, or does he want me to think that? _

The expression of amusement grew more pronounced.

_Fuck. _

"I am being truthful," he said. "I generally have reasons _to _kill, but not for inaction. Killing every person with whom I come into contact would be foolish and impractical."

He returned her exploratory look, that of a medical probe, with one that seemed fierce as a Stryker saw. "But I think that answer disappoints you."

"No," she said. "It, uh. It makes sense." _It makes sense, Starling? What the fuck? No it doesn't. You can't just kill people, even if you have a 'reason,' and you sure as hell can't eat them. _But she smiled, then, and said, "There's breakfast?"


	5. Visiting Hour

So , they ate breakfast together, Starling thoroughly surprised at how enjoyable it all was.

The only bad moment came when Starling wondered aloud at the fact that Jack Crawford hadn't called or even dropped by to check in yet, and Hannibal—_Dr. Lecter, Dr. Lecter, goddamnit—_looked, with showy, feigned guilt, down at his plate.

He let it go far enough that Clarice almost vomited all over the table before he laughed. She was surprised, after that, at how easy it was to let the macabre joke slip away, to take another sip of orange juice, another bite of prosciutto (which, yeah, okay, was damned amazing). The thought flitted across her mind that it might be as easy to let it go if he'd been serious, but she reassured herself by thinking repeatedly that it was only her FBI training, desensitized doesn't mean depraved, etc.

It wasn't terribly effective.

"Seriously, though," she said, "What if Crawford comes by? And Ardelia's going to come back--"

"Miss Mapp, Agent Starling, strikes me as the sort who, when confronted by egregious incompetence—for example, a hospital incorrectly informing someone that her dear relation had been taken ill—seeks, what is the expression, 'to get to the bottom of it' and have it righted, am I correct?"

Starling addressed a muttered "Yes" to her omelette.

"So she'll be quite busy for a while. Crawford, however--" Hannibal cocked his head and waited for a moment. The doorbell chimed, and he made a smile like that of a predatory cat. "He'll be more difficult."

Clarice stared at him. He gave no sign of fear, even agitation. In fact, he looked quite like—and now she searched for an expression—the cat who had eaten the canary. An insane, wild laugh bubbled up in her throat at the thought.

His grin widened. "What are you going to do, Clarice?" he asked. "Turn me in? Oh, and we were having such a _nice _time."

The doorbell rang again.

"Coming," Clarice choked out, loud and strangled.

"_Seriously, though_," he said in her accent, "It won't look so good when they see I've been taking care of you so fastidiously, that we've been having a cozy little _breakfast_, and you haven't called to invite Jacky-boy to our little party. "

Clarice didn't move so much as an eyelash. She stared at him in a kind of stupor of hate and something else, something intransigent, that flew from her grasp like a stubborn sparrow whenever she tried to put a name to it.

The bell rang again. She could hear Crawford calling her name.

"You'd better get that, Clarice," Lecter said. "He's FBI, you know, and they haven't the most amicable relationship with doors."

"Jack Crawford is not going to break into my house," Starling said, her equanimity returning.

"He might if he thought you were lying helpless on the floor. He quite likes being the hero, you know."

"Go hide in a goddamn closet if you don't want to get arrested. See if I fucking care what you do," she said, and went limping to answer the door.

"Aw, you don't mean that," he said. He was mocking someone's accent, probably hers, but she had gone down the hall and was focused on not hearing him, or at the very least making him think she couldn't hear him.

It was a losing battle. He could see her stiffen and twitch from his comfortable spot at the breakfast table, and she knew it. She turned on her heel three-quarters of the way to the door and shot him a glare, but he wasn't there any longer.

_Good, I hope he's damn well gone, _Starling thought, but she knew as she did that she also somehow hoped he was merely in the closet, not gone, and she had no idea why.

_I grow on people, _his voice said in her head. _Like cancer, _she thought back, and amusement competed with revulsion alongside it. She decided for the moment to go with amusement; she was sick enough as it was. _In all senses of the word, _she thought, then: _Oh, shut up, Starling_.

She went to answer the door as one might have gone to meet an executioner (though, she couldn't help thinking, not _him_; he would have made it seem his own clever joke on all of them until his last heartbeat).

She opened the door slowly. Crawford stood fidgeting awkwardly on her stoop, worry etched into his face, although that was hardly new.

"Hi, Mr. Crawford," she said, trying to sound natural and thinking if she didn't, she'd just blame it on her ankle.

"Jack, Starling."

"Clarice, Mr. Crawford."

Their minor impasse at least won a tepid smile from him. He shifted foot-to-foot, unsure of how to proceed. _Wow, Clarice, not a date for six months and now you've had two men vampiring around on your porch in one day! _

Not that she wanted to date her mentor and sometime boss. Or, of course, the serial murderer who was probably lurking in her pantry, probably mentally criticizing her lack of foods he considered edible—oh, _that's _funny, Starling, keep 'em coming—not that it even needed to be said.

This was just ridiculous.

"Come in Mr. Crawford," Starling said in lieu of screaming her head off. "I was just finishing breakfast--" _Oh God. Two place settings. Shit_.

But Crawford was already in the kitchen, curse her place for being so small, and she was scrambling for excuses—_Ardelia—unless he knows she's gone—you're paranoid, why the fuck would he, she doesn't work for him, he's not out to catch you in a lie, Starling, stop it—_

She walked in with incoherence spilling everywhere only to shut up promptly upon realizing that only her place setting remained.

_He hasn't stayed free this long by neglecting details, that's for sure. _

Starling made a tight smile and offered Crawford coffee, forcing herself not to look at the pantry door for fear that she would either blurt out that she had a cannibal in the closet or start laughing hysterically.

"Are you all right, Starling?" Crawford asked.

"Yeah, uh, yeah, I am," she said.

"Something's strange about your voice," he said.

"Uh, yeah—the accent gets thicker, when I'm not thinkin' straight, and they put me on medication, for pain too, even though I didn't need it--" this directed as much as possible at the pantry—"so, that's what it is, probably."

"I suppose."

She could practically hear Lecter in her head: _It also gets thicker when you lie. _

"How have things been, at Behavioral Sciences?" she said, idiotically, to say something.

"I'm sorry I couldn't get them to assign you there on a more permanent basis, Starling."

"Yeah, I know, I was just…" she took a long sip of coffee. She could feel him glaring at her from the pantry. _Caffeine raises your heart rate, Agent Starling. That is not what you need right now; you're already highly anxious. You also ought to elevate your ankle. _

"I know." Crawford took a drink of his own coffee. Starling put hers down. There was a prolonged moment of awkwardness. Starling's eyes flickered everywhere but at the pantry, finally fixing on an FBI magnet on her fridge. She had never realized how fundamentally absurd the existence of such a thing was until now. It embarrassed her, suddenly.

"Do you ever think about him?" Crawford was saying, and even though _he _was probably what loomed largest in her mind it took her a moment to work out.

"Lecter? Sure," she said. "A lot, lately."

He chuckled in her head.

"Me too."

_He's your white whale, _she thought but didn't say.

"I wonder if he'll ever come back," she said, partly to amuse the man hiding in her pantry, and mostly to divert the one sitting across the table.

"You think he would? To—see you?"

"Me? No. He told me he wouldn't come back to kill me, so he won't. He doesn't lie. And I'm not enough of a draw for him to come back to, God, I don't even know what, visit?"

"No?"

"He was just bored. That's why he talked to me, nothing else. And now he's got the whole world to entertain him." _Why did you come back, Doctor? _

"But you did have some connection."

She must have made a face, because Crawford continued, "Nothing like they say in those—tawdry papers—but, something. He never talked to anyone else."

"He must've been planning it, and I just came along at the right time. He saw a way he could maybe get out."

"From the very beginning?"

"You know how smart he is."

"Smarter than any of us."

_If you knew where he is, _Clarice thought, _you'd regret saying that. _

"Yeah," she said. "He'll keep running forever, unless he gets bored and decides to play with us, and when he's done with that, he'll run again." _Is that what you're doing, Doctor? Playing? Bored with the world already? _

"But you really don't think there was any connection at all, between you?"

"Mr. Crawford," Clarice said, forcing her voice to stay level, "Even Dr. Chilton said he was a pure psychopath, and he never took that VICAP test you sent me in with as a blind, so we have no evidence that he's not. He can't form emotional connections. All he can do is use people, and really all we were doing was using him. That's it. A mutual manipulation." _You're too young to be so cynical, my dear Clarice. _

_Shut up, _Clarice thought to the Hannibal Lecter who lived in her head. _Okay, this is getting pathetic. _

_Getting? _

_And now it's downright schizophrenic. Jesus Christ, Starling_.

"I'm sorry you got mixed up in that, Starling."

_Nice use of the passive voice, Crawford. _Her inner voice was getting more acerbic with age. She decided it was from sheer proximity to Lecter.

"Nah, it was just—a thing that happened." _You can't reduce me to a set of influences_. "I learned a lot, anyway. I don't know if I'm better for it, but I'm not sorry about it."

_What's your definition of better? Because if that hadn't happened, there sure as hell wouldn't be a cannibal in my pantry. And I definitely wouldn't be depraved enough to be thinking of all the awful jokes that entails_.

Clarice needed Crawford gone with sudden intensity. She needed Crawford gone and Lecter out in the open again; she was somehow not surprised to find that she craved his company, his insight; that the whole time Crawford had been sitting in her kitchen she and Lecter had been complicit, legally and in her own mind. At least if he came out and sat across from her, he might get the hell out of her head.

She stood up to clear the table and grimaced, leaning over her ankle briefly.

"Are you all right?"

The obvious concern in Crawford's voice made the wince deepen with true guilt.

"Yeah, I'm okay." She pulled herself up with real effort. "I should put my ankle up, though."

"Do you need help?"

"No, I'm fine."

He looked unconvinced. She limped over to the couch and put her ankle up.

"See?"

"Maybe I should stay…"

"Ardelia will be home in an hour. I'll be fine. You're busy."

He didn't move.

"_Go_, or else I'll feel obligated to entertain you. Seriously, Mr. Crawford."

"Goodbye, Agent Starling. I hope your ankle gets better."

"It will. Bye, Mr. Crawford."

When the door closed, she could breathe again, and she knew this meant something was deeply wrong with her.


	6. Confession

**A/N: Well, uh, college happened. I really haven't a good explanation besides that. **

**Disclaimer: Not mine. **

When she came back into the kitchen, he was sitting, drinking from a cup of coffee, just as if their breakfast hadn't been interrupted by the FBI.

"Do you have anything stronger than this?" he asked.

"You mean whiskey? Cause I got that."

"_Be_cause you _have_ that, Clarice, and no. I meant stronger coffee. It's not even ten in the morning."

"Exactly, I've already had you and Crawford in my kitchen at the same damn time, so if there was ever a morning for Irish coffee, it's this one."

"Irish--"

"I'm half so I'm allowed to say that."

"Scots-Irish is not the same--"

"I fucking know that."

He gave a low whistle. "Tes-_ty_ this morning, aren't we?"

"You aren't, you patronizing little--"

"That's somewhat of a hypocritical statement, isn't it?"

"You know what?"

"Probably." He hadn't even stood up. He sipped his coffee, his face set in an unmistakable smirk.

Her mind buzzed like a mouse's heart, too fast and thick with anger to make any more elegant of a statement than "Fuck you."

"Please."

She made an inarticulate noise somewhere between a groan and a scream and stormed onto the little tacked-on excuse for a back porch.

"You shouldn't get angry in that condition, and you should probably lie down," he called after her. She slammed the door and leaned her elbows on the rickety railing, fixing her eyes on the base of a scraggly tree near Ardelia's living room window. Her brain was still too full of noise and static to think in anything approaching a straight line, and so she just breathed out in a long furious hiss, picturing her hands around Lecter's neck. Her stupid, fuzzy brain decided to take her happy, murderous little fantasy down a far darker road, and she watched her mind move her hands down his back and her mouth to his face, and then she shut her eyes tight—as if that would make the internal image go away!—and screamed inside her head until it was cleaned out as her cabinets got after a particularly frustrating day.

_-oh, don't you wish_?

God-fucking-damn, now it was getting to the point where her head-voices were actually fucking _merging_. Ardelia and Lecter in one, and if that wasn't the most horrifyingly insightful hybrid possible she'd eat her gun. Which she might just do anyway, at this point.

She finally let out a real scream and shook the railing for good measure, half-hoping it would break. Oh, she needed to snap something hard between her hands. A neck, really, Lecter's for preference, and _no_, mind, do not go there, don't you dare, I'll lock you up in a padded corner, she thought, aware as she did that she obviously could not lock up her mind, really _was _her mind—oh shit, was Descartes really going to crawl in there too?

"Are you all right, Clarice?" Voice getting louder richer smoother halfway through as he opened the door.

"No, Doctor Lecter, I am _not_," she called back, aware of how thick and rough her own was, how the accent had crept in with the cold air. "Me 'n my mind 'n my brain are having a fight."

"…oh," he said, then after a beat, "Is that all?"

"Schizophrenia ain't enough?" Yeah, she'd admit, she'd slipped that in partly to make him wince.

He laughed out loud again, that genuine sound that surprised her. "Freudians would call that your id, ego, and superego having a fight, and they would call it natural."

"Yeah, well, I'm pretty sure the superego's no longer involved."

"_That _is interesting."

"Fuck off."

"They'd also have something to say about how you continue to use that word around me."

"And I already told you what I have to say about Freud."

"You have not, however, told me what exactly you have to say about me."

She stomped her foot and hissed out her air.

"You enjoy my company, evidently."

"Evidently."

"You had a perfect out, an FBI agent, a man you trust, in your house, out of earshot, plenty of time to plan, arm yourselves, call the rest of your dear little law enforcement friends, but you didn't."

"I didn't, no," she said. "You helped me."

"You could easily have gone to the hospital."

"Wouldn't of." She shifted her weight from foot to foot, ignoring the pain from her bad ankle.

"Still, you hardly _needed _me."

"I was bored."

"That's an excuse I would use, little Starling, not one of yours."

"I told you not to--"

"Don't change the subject."

"Fine." Something in what he had said snagged on the edge of her mind. "Excuse?"

His eyes lit up. "A-ha, you caught that. Good girl."

"What does that mean—that you didn't just talk to me because you were bored, in the dungeon?"

He watched her eyes flick back and forth over his face, and smiled. "Yes."

"Why then?" She had dropped the game; this was all at once his best Clarice and Agent Starling. Her blue eyes were bright and clear, her voice tight. Her stance had shifted; she was wound and ready, every muscle focused. Almost birdlike, ready for flight. Not a starling though. A peregrine falcon.

"Oh, before I met you, it was boredom—that's why I agreed to speak with you, initially. After our first conversation, however—that was a different matter. You are rather enchanting, Clarice."

"You made me cry. How could you know I'd come back? It was…highly improbable."

"I took a calculated risk."

_ Of course_, she thought. _Your existence is a calculated risk, Doctor. _

"Yeah?"

"I could see how very clever you were, Agent Starling, and I _so _hoped you would figure it out. I thought you would, and you did. And once you did, then I knew you'd come back. I could tell from your face when I insulted you that you would never let go. It motivates you, doesn't it, when people tell you you aren't good enough? Gives you strength?"

"Yes." She pressed her lips together. "What the hell are you even trying to say?"

"That, in a certain sense, I am—that is, I am _quite _attracted to you."

Her eyes narrowed for a moment, and her face looked for purchase, landing finally on an expression of deep mirth.

"Oh," she said, mimicking him, "oh, is _that _all, really?!"

When she had stopped laughing and caught her breath and raised her eyes to stare at him with complete seriousness, well. It was the first time in a great many years that Hannibal Lecter had not the slightest idea of what his interlocutrix was going to say.


	7. Decision

Clarice cocked her head at him, her hair falling over her shoulder to expose her neck with its vulnerable artery. _A mark of trust_, he thought, or, _the calculation of a predator_.

How long had it been, since he had looked at someone and not known what lay inside her mind? He kept his eyes on hers, but he was scanning, still; in one quick flick he'd memorized her stance, the tension of her muscles.

"I suppose you know what I'm gonna say," Clarice said at last, accent slipped in like an afterthought.

"Not at all."

"No little psychic trick?"

"It's hardly infallible, my dear Clarice; I've miscalculated before. I should hardly have ended up incarcerated if I had not." He was not entirely certain whether alluding to the dungeon was a good idea; after all, that would remind her of what he had done to get there, which was hardly a thought amenable to her accepting his suit. Yet it was also a humanization, and that could only help.

"Everything's a calculation, isn't it?"

He realized with delight that she was testing him; _oh, Clarice Starling_, he thought, _how marvelous you are; who else would have the temerity to test me_?

"At a certain level, yes," he said. "We all attempt to calculate and calibrate our actions to achieve certain results, Agent Starling; the FBI certainly tries. You've done interrogations, have you not? That's a particularly vivid illustration, but it is only a magnification of what we all do every day."

"Yes…" she said, and paused. "So—you've been calculating all this, then—for a certain result?"

"Of course."

"Since—since the dungeon?"

"In part, yes."

"And have you achieved it?"

The slightest of smiles, an inclination of the head. "I don't know yet."

A moment. Clarice's mouth worked , twisting into the warrior's expression he remembered from their first encounter. Her eyes tightened, the irises contracting, solidifying. She had decided.

"Yes," Clarice said. She closed her eyes hard, as if blocking something out, and then opened them again, wide and bright. "You do."

And then she took his face in her hands and brought it to her lips.

…

That first kiss, he thought later, was very like something he himself would have done; testing, an experiment of sorts, designed to elicit a reaction.

He had always known Clarice was a deeply physical being, very tactile, someone who learned through writing, as though absorbing the words through her hand, who thought best while running, the movement of her slim legs echoing the forward process of her mind. He had wondered, on certain pleasant rambles of his own, what she might think of as she dashed, deerlike, through the forest…but to the point. To her mind, touching him would be akin to knowing him, in both the Biblical sense and the more common usage. It was, really, the only way for her to trust him.

She had kissed him for a moment, and stopped, considering; and then, she kissed him again for a long, deep, moment, and he stored it carefully as it occurred, in a beautiful, high-ceilinged room that resounded with music.

Her eyes were open, blue and dilated, fearful and feline at once. They watched each other.

He thought of Plato: soul and body, joined, joining another's: a single soul ruling over two bodies, in the parlance of Castiglione's Pietro Bembo. The animal instinct, those wary, predatory eyes, the hunger of their mouths—and the reason, the analysis, that, finally, made Clarice blink and step back.

"I can't—I can't believe I--"

And he said, "But you did, Clarice, and you enjoyed it, didn't you?"

"Yes—oh, yes, I did, but--" she glanced around her yard. "Shit," she said.

He watched the vulgar word ground her and began to understand its usefulness: the plain Anglo-Saxon harshness of it a comforting jolt back to reality.

"Let's go inside," she said, and he followed her quick, nervous steps without a word.

…

_Fuck_, Clarice thought, shutting the door behind them with quick efficiency. _Fuck, fuck, fuck. What the __**hell **__are you doing, Starling? _

_I don't know. _

_Why did you kiss him? Why didn't you tell Crawford? Why the fuck did you kiss him?! _

She thought of her job, and felt no tug of longing in her stomach the way she used to when she thought of going to work; no delighted inward glow when she imagined her future in the FBI, just exhaustion and a twinge of cold dread around her heart at the thought of all the long tiring years ahead, not moving forward, crushed under the weight of papers and bureaucracy, keeping her from actually accomplishing things, _saving lives. _

She imagined life with him, and felt, against her will, that old familiar pull of yearning forward in her gut, between her ribs.

He looked at her keenly, brows half-raised. The sunlight streaming through the door hit his eyes and they shone crimson. She felt her diaphragm contract involuntarily at the sight.

_Yeah, dissect it. That'll make it go away. _

She shook her head, as if to rid herself of her impure thoughts.

"Thinking something wicked, Clarice?"

_Fuck it, how does he do that? _ "No."

"Don't lie."

"Morality is subjective."

His eyes flashed with delight. Her response was unanticipated; even so casually tossed off, it indicated a shift in her thinking, her rigid principles. No good little Lutheran Home girl would ever have said such a thing, and he'd long known those external ideas were contrary to much of her nature. That, of course, was why she no longer went to church at all. 

"_Very _good, Clarice," he hissed, and she raised her eyebrows, half in irritation, half in imitation.

"Only to a point," she said, and gave him a feral grin.

"Is that point past leaving your precious FBI and coming with me?" he asked. There was the slightest, quick hiccup in his heartbeat; he breathed in, imperceptibly deeper, and it calmed.

She closed her eyes so tight the eyelids wrinkled. He could tell easily that her heartbeat was going fast as a mouse's; she made no attempt to hide it.

"Clarice?"

"I…"

"You what?"

"I…I….don't know," she said finally. Her eyes had gone wide, making her look younger than her years, and far, far younger than the weight he knew she carried. "I need…some time."

"Of course you do." _Time alone_, he thought, _she mustn't go back to work, and Crawford mustn't visit again. _Mapp returning was a danger as well, and perhaps more potent than Crawford; Clarice craved advancement, but she was fiercely loyal to her roommate, and certainly Mapp was the deepest _emotional _connection Clarice had to the FBI, or indeed her current life in general. "You'll require absolute solitude, will you not? Rest, and peace."

Clarice, looking unsure, nodded, suspecting a catch.

"I'll procure a hotel room for you, nearby. Call Crawford and tell him you'll require the rest of the week for your ankle to heal properly, and tell Miss Mapp--"

"Oh shoot, what _will _I tell her? Can't say I've gone to the hospital, she'll want to visit--"

"Your ankle is already infected, your immune system vulnerable. You'll certainly recover, but you're not to be permitted visitors, particularly visitors who have just come from another hospital on an airplane—absolutely _full _of germs."

"I thought you didn't lie."

"I do not, except when it is necessary, and I will not be doing so now. You will be the one lying to Miss Mapp, and everything, save your location, is absolutely true."

Clarice made an exasperated noise. "Fine."

"You agree?"

"Yes," Clarice said, letting her arms fall to her sides. "Yes, I do."


	8. Rumination

It wasn't anywhere he would have called _nice_, but Clarice had insisted, and he thought it best not to make her too uncomfortable, not to thrust her _utterly _out of her depth, so the Marriott it would have to be, for her and for him as well, not of course that she would know that. Taking the room next door was a bit of a risky business and it meant he would have to be exceedingly careful in his movements, but he felt it would be well worth it to hear and smell her while he waited.

She drove on her own. He thought it was most important that she retain her independence and have an easy escape route; he had no intention of forcing her decision.

Of course, he was also very nearly certain of what it would be.

…

Clarice arrived mid-afternoon, carrying a small suitcase and limping faintly. She checked in, feeling nervous as she did; she'd never really conducted such an exchange before and wasn't entirely sure how to handle it, and a familiar feeling niggled at the back of her mind, the old fear that she was only masquerading as an adult, an FBI agent, a real person, and that any second now someone—some much taller, gaunt, authority figure was going to accost her, reveal her before them all, and drag her back to the Lutheran Home.

Of course, no one did, and she made it upstairs without thoroughly embarrassing herself. Unsurprisingly, she found a note on her bed when she arrived, and she could tell the moment she saw the handwriting that it was, as she'd expected, from _him_.

_My Dear Clarice, _

_I hope you have found the accommodations in order; if anything is amiss, I trust you will let me know. A note for a Dr. Nichols at the front desk will suffice. Please order whatever you like from room service. I will be visiting you briefly to ensure that your ankle is healing as it should and that you are following the medicinal regimen I have set forth for you with all due rigor. Otherwise, I shall leave you alone to think. If you do desire my company, tell the front desk to put you through to Dr. Nichols and you shall receive that which you request. _

_Sincerely, _

_Hannibal Lecter, M.D. _

_P.S. _

_I have left you some reading material on the bedside table. Peruse it (you do know the proper meaning of that word, do you not?) at your leisure. _

_-H _

Clarice glanced at the night table. Dante, Petrarch, Marcus Aurelius, Aristotle. She went over to examine the books. _Divine Comedy, La Vita Nuova, Meditations, Poetics…_she found one beneath the rest and glanced at it with surprise. Edmund Spenser's _Faerie Queene. _She'd never known him to fancy an English author before.

_Not one for light reading, eh, Doc? _

_This is light reading, Agent Starling. _

She laughed a little; surely he thought he was being more than fair by giving her space in which to decide which life to choose, but what he didn't know was that he goddamn lived inside her head.

She considered that a moment. Hell, of course he knew. He wouldn't be so confident otherwise.

_Shouldn't he be? _

Clarice thought about it. Almost more tempting than the idea of freedom, of Florence and Buenos Aires and Paris and the world entire was his mind, his knowledge, opened once and for all to _her_.

_You're hungry, Agent Starling. That's what draws you to me. That hunger_, he whispered in her mind.

_Hungry for what, Doctor? _

_ What do you _think_? _

Will Graham had called his voice metallic, and Starling thought that was right; only sometimes it melted and flowed over her ears like liquid gold. Or over her temporal lobes anyway, considering she was only imagining his voice. He'd know which regions of her skull-locked brain were lighting up as she recalled the tone of his voice, as the associated memories spilled out.

There was, of course, that: he knew damn well everything. He could predict everything she was going to do before she'd even thought it. Could she live with that?

_But he can't . He didn't know you were going to kiss him. He doesn't always know what you're thinking—that's why he likes you. _

_ And if he figures me out? _

_ Ask him. He doesn't lie. _

_ Hah. Ask him if he's going to eat me if I bore him like it's normal dinner conversation. Great. _

Someone knocked at the door. "Miss Golden?" called a man's voice, and it took Clarice a moment to remember that that was the name under which she had checked in. _Like Aurelius. Like golden-haired Laura. Probably Beatrice, too, they were all golden-haired. How inappropriate for me. _Her throat tightened, and for a moment she lost her breath.

"Yes?"

"Room service."

_Damn. Damn? Damn. _

She went to the door. He had gotten her a lovely filet and Chianti; of course he had. She was surprised he hadn't added lamb and fava beans to the mix; but that would have been trying too hard. He was subtler.

She took the plate to the room's nondescript desk and sat, her food growing cold, drinking the strong wine, reading Spenser, the outlier. The things that did not belong were always the most important. She had learned that from her first case with him.

He had marked book 3, written _Does Britomart remind you of anyone_?

Britomart, the female knight, searching the land for the man she was meant to love, the man with whom she was meant to found England, though they both were Welsh, like the Tudors. It took Clarice a while to accustom herself to Spenser's early modern English, especially given that it sounded older because he was trying to imitate Chaucer, but there were footnotes, and Lecter had glossed some things himself, and left her other comments in the margins. She wondered if this broke his promise not to try to sway her. But after a time, the language swallowed her whole, and she became absorbed in Britomart's quest.

When Britomart reached the house of Busyrane to rescue the young Amoret, Clarice found her breath caught. Something about the story felt deeply familiar as Britomart made her way through the fascinating, horrifying art set out by the magician, as she watched him torture the other young woman, as, finally, she sprung and cut him down, sustaining only a minor wound herself.

Clarice came to herself rubbing the gunpowder marks over her cheekbone. _Of course_. She was Britomart, Britomart who rescued Amoret and stood outside watching Amoret embrace her fiancé, stood and watched all alone.

_Fuck you, Dr. Lecter_, Clarice scrawled, and felt herself, irrationally, beginning to sob. She took a sip of the lukewarm wine. It felt like blood in her mouth. She took it and Dante to the bath.


	9. Visitation

_Ed una lupa, che di tutte brame_

_sembiava carca ne la sua magrezza, _

_e molte genti fe gia viver grame, _

_questa mi porse tanto de gravezza_

_con la paura ch'uscia di sua vista,_

_ch'io perdei la speranza de l'altezza. _

_And then a she-wolf who, all hide and bones,_

_seemed charged with all the appetites_

_that have made many live in wretchedness_

_so weighed my spirits down with terror_

_which welled up at the sight of her,_

_that I lost hope of making the ascent. _

Dante Alighieri, _Inferno_: Canto 1, Lines 49-54

Translation by Robert and Jean Hollander

She was hungry. She'd come out of the bath, having read through fifty pages of Dante (and finished off the wine), and she was hungry and antsy instead of lethargic, which was her usual reaction to hot water and alcohol.

She called room service, asked them for another steak. She hadn't touched the first one, she'd been so engrossed by Spenser.

She read the note again. He'd said he would come, to set up her medicine; where the hell was he? She threw the Spenser on the bed, and a note fell out:

_Be bold, but not too bold, my dear Clarice. What wilt thou be, una lupa or the holy Beatrice? I always found her rather tiresome, but I suppose even a great poet has his faults, no? Spenser certainly did. _

_ If you've come this far, that's good, very good. And don't worry; I'll be along shortly. _

_ I do hope you enjoy your bath, and the Dante. Your copy has both the original Italian and the translation; try reading the former aloud, for the terza rima. _

_ Ta-ta,_

_ H _

She threw the letter on the bed next to the book, still unable to decide whether she loved him or hated him. A knock came on the door.

"Miss Golden," a voice less asked than stated, and she wondered how she could have mistaken the room service guy for him before; that voice of liquid gold was inimitable, whether it was glowing with warmth or terrifyingly cold.

She had no idea what name he'd checked in under, so she just said, "Doctor," because he always kept his title, and unbarred the door to let him in.

He came in, medical bag clutched loosely in his left-hand, formerly possessed of six fingers.

"Good evening, Clarice," he said.

"Hi," she responded, really far too relaxed to give half a shit how like a recalcitrant adolescent she sounded.

"How is your ankle?"

"Feels fine."

He noticed that her accent was returning. He'd already known, of course, that hiding it was a conscious effort on her part. He was very good at mimicking others' accents, a skill likely related to his ability to play several instruments by ear. Considering his lifestyle, this was quite fortunate; perhaps a slight compensation for his other, highly visible, congenital uniquenesses. That would be, of course, if he believed in any kind of higher power other than natural selection, though, to play fast and loose with science for a moment, who was to say that such an adaptation was not advantageous for what he was? It had certainly aided him in surviving; why not some long-ago, predatory ancestor? The nobility was hardly exempt from murderers. Gilles de Rais, Elizabeth Bathory—most of the world's early serial killers had in fact come of noble birth. But to the point.

"Nonetheless," he said finally, "You need these."

She lay back on the bed and let him hang the IV bag from the bedpost and slip the cold needle into the back of her hand.

Funny. She'd thought, with him here, that she might've been able to muster up the blood pressure for him to find a vein elsewhere. _Oh, great, Starling. Fuck you and your stupid moron brain. _

But she wasn't listening to her Ardelia-voice; her brain was fuzzed with wine and heat and lazy satiation, so she reached up, put her arm half around the doctor's neck, and brought his face down to hers.

He moved his head back for a moment, tilted it, and regarded her silently before he, carefully, accepted her advanced, making very sure not to disturb her IV line. She kissed him for quite a long while, and then all of a sudden she pulled back, looked at his face in her hands and said,

"Oh, God—Jesus, I can't—please, get out, get out of here now!"

He looked surprised again, almost hurt. She'd never seen an expression like that on his face before, and she felt a pang of regret sing in her blood. But not loudly enough.

"Clarice," he said, his breath coming with difficulty. Even his pulse was raised now.

"Please," she said, "I just—I need to be left alone, please."

"Of course," he said. "I should not have allowed that at this stage. Forgive me."

He adjusted the flow of her IV and disappeared out the door, and she was left alone.


	10. Imagination

As soon as he shut the door, she threw herself onto the bed anew in a spasm of self-loathing. She stood and paced and threw punches into empty air. _Why the fuck did you send him away? _

Her brain fumed at her one moment and supported her the next: _He's a serial murderer, Starling, a ser-i-al kill-er, for Christ's sake, how could you even consider letting him into your bed? _

She'd call, ordinarily, Ardelia. They'd watch crap TV together until she was ready to talk and then Ardelia would calm her, make her feel better, and the balled-up fist of her guts would unsnarl enough to let her sleep, keep her from needing constant motion.

But she knew what Ardelia would say, knew how her friend would look at her with knotted-up eyes and how her voice would go off and things would shift between them. How there'd been nights recently when she and Dee had been sitting together at the kitchen table and she'd wanted to say, "Dee, what if you wanted so hard to be with someone you knew was—" but that was where it stopped, because if she said "wrong for you," Dee would just raise an eyebrow and ask "Wrong _how_?" and if she said "evil," Dee would look at her and say, "E_vilˆ_? Like what, a vampire?"

And what did you say to that? "No, just a cannibal"? No. She and Dee had had a Hannibal Lecter sized gulf between them for some time now. And it wasn't just him; Ardelia loved her work at the Bureau, was happy more days than not going and coming from it, while Clarice found that most mornings she had to drag herself from her bed, and her exhausted frustration didn't improve all day, all night, knowing she just had to do it again and again and nothing would ever come of it.

Clarice's stomach felt small and balled up somewhere just below her heart and she couldn't stop pacing. Her pulse was high and her ankle ached but she couldn't sit, couldn't stop. With a groan she threw herself to the floor and began to sob in thick, angry bursts because this was _not how it was supposed to be_; she was on the wrong train and it was crashing. The FBI had been everything and it amounted to an albatross about her neck, and she didn't even _want _the payoff anymore, she didn't want to play the game. She was good now, she was ready now. She wasn't hungry for it anymore, already the fire was burning out in her. She didn't want to grow old in the jump seat of a van, didn't want to end up alone and bored behind a desk when she was fifty. Christ, she felt old now and she wasn't yet thirty and she was so fucking tired it was unbelievable, just like—like she was never getting off this floor, never pulling herself together and facing the choice that was before her.

Except it wasn't a choice. Because ignoring the ancillaries—the food and the travel and the wine and the culture and even the excitement that filled her lungs and veins when he was near her—it wasn't Ardelia she wanted to talk to anymore, it was him. That was it. There was the plain fact that the people she spoke to, the people she dealt with, just _didn't understand_. They were shallow, there was nothing in their eyes, they were content with such small, neatly tended squares of life, a space she simply couldn't accept as _all there is to hope for_. There had to be more—these weren't the rules, she wasn't going to give up adventure and excitement in her mid-twenties. And he—he knew. He ignored the rules, built his own worlds, suited to him, without kowtowing to the needs of those below him in intellect and imagination.

_Mmm_. Something snagged in her mind. Something he had said, but not something she'd heard, something she'd read- it was in a report of Will Graham's…_without our imaginations… we'd be like all those other poor dullards. Fear is the price of our instrument. But I can help you bear it_.

Graham was a hard thought to have, but now it didn't trip her up, to think of him. She had Hannibal in her mind. To him, Graham was a traitor. There was a logical system to how Lecter worked; he had a code. It was a hard code, a code that favored justice above mercy, but in many ways so was her own. She found it hard to credit those who blamed society or their upbringing for their crimes, because having grown up in an orphanage, she had pulled herself up to the FBI. And Hannibal, who deserved to blame his childhood, categorically refused to admit to the possibility that anything had 'formed' him.

But imagination: there it was. Imagination did breed fear; she knew what could come of her choices. She knew what Hannibal had done, if she tried she could imagine what his victims had felt before they died. And she knew it was wrong but she didn't care, because there was something beyond the limits of her world, of the world Ardelia and Crawford and Graham and all the rest felt constrained to—and that was why Graham had fallen so hard, he had been like her and Hannibal and had tried to run away, to hide from himself. And she didn't want to end up burned out, no career, no family, quite literally defaced, a drunk in the Florida Keys—she wanted to fill herself. She was hungry, she was full of need and dark insatiable appetites, she was a wolf.

She picked up the phone.


	11. Resolution

_Five Years Later_

She hits the path hard with every step, muscles taut, face full up with purpose, ponytail swinging. It's three miles there and three back and she runs it twice a day when she needs it. The last length is the hardest, pounding breathless, eyes numb to scenery, feet almost nonexistent beneath her. The motivation is the strongest here, though. She is not running away. She is running _to _(This is one sentence he allows her to end with a preposition. For effect).

Her hair is shorter, a lighter auburn. She is still pale but less so. Her eyes are still blue and sharp. She has spent time under strange suns, on strange shores. She is thirty-one years old. She looks lighter on her feet and smiles more, even as she runs, eyes focused.

Sometimes she feels she has been smiling hard for five years, ever since she called him and he came back.

She answered the door, eyes wet, face bleary and streaked, and his eyes drank her like a fine wine.

"Clarice," he breathed.

"Shut up," she said, and pulled him inside and down over her, onto the bed. Her hips were light in his hands. Her pajamas skimmed easily over her legs and she kicked them off, a mermaid losing her tail. Her face lost its sadness as he watched, her eyes lighting, her mouth losing its set and giving into fluidity. She was loose marble shaping beneath his hands, her own form emerging. He was only smoothing, he was not the sculptor but simply the refiner, mostly the observer, privileged to view this transformation.

And he was transforming, too, as she cried out in wild joy, giving voice to the vision of a loosed mare against the blue shadows of the West Virginian mountains, mane flowing with her speed. He was transforming as he and she made themselves a single creature, and both shifted, new and old. He thought of chemistry, of bonding; she thought of everything and nothing.

Afterward, she thought, _I am happy_. She thought, _My father wanted this for me_, and the last of her guilt pulled away from her heart and floated free, into the night sky.

And now she runs, the longest part, the hardest. She thinks of the house where they live, near a city we wouldn't think of naming, set a distance out, not quite in the woods but near enough. She can run through them and think of her childhood. He can look at the lake and bring himself to think of his, without the bitter tang of what came after, now that she is running back toward him, always. They have many friends here, but none who know them. They are bound so tightly that this does not matter. They go into the city often, several nights a week, and the other nights they stay at home. They both have their work, different work than before; it is good work, interesting work, for them both, but it is hardly everything. It does not need to be, for they have brilliant worlds between them when they return to their house at night, when they think of each other, when they wander the corridors of each other's minds. They do not have secrets, for they are so nearly the same person that when one knows something, it is mere minutes until the other knows it, too.

The FBI and the papers believe that she was his final kill. They think perhaps she managed to shoot him, before dying herself, or that he killed himself after her death, or perhaps, coincidentally, died in some other pedestrian way—a car accident, a heart attack, any number of mundane possibilities.

A few in the FBI voiced the possibility that she might have run away with him, but Ardelia and Crawford refused to hear of it, and the idea quickly died when years passed without another Lecter murder. After all, they had always believed that serial killers could not simply stop. They still thought that BTK was dead or incarcerated. It would be years before he resurfaced. When that happened, there would be a flicker of renewed interest in dormant cases like Lecter's, which quickly petered out. From their home, in a new city by then, 2005, Hannibal and Clarice read the papers to each other and could not help but laugh.


End file.
